9
There’s a plan in my soup
I’ll be honest: after what happened last night in the car, I didn’t think me and Aegan would ever talk again.
But he showed up the next day. Seven o’clock in the morning. Like the big pain in the ass that he was.
I was still in my pajamas, with sleep in my eyes, and was just about to step into the bathroom when he barged in. I froze and stared at him in disbelief.
“What the hell are you doing?” I shrieked.
He cocked his head slightly to one side, with the puzzled look of a puppy startled by a noise.
“I walked in the door.”
“I know you walked in the door!” I snapped louder in exasperation. “Why are you just barging in through my door?”
“Maybe because it’s the only way to get into the apartment?
” he replied, seemingly equally incredulous.
And the only thing missing now was for him to do like the “reatziona, Justin, reatziona” girl.
Remember? That girl who went viral years ago for posting a video asking Justin Bieber to react?
If you don’t remember it, Google it. It’s an all-time classic.
“Fuck, you know damn well what I mean, Aegan,” I said under my breath.
“I can go wherever I like around Tagus, everybody knows that,” he explained to me, like it wasn’t completely insane. Then he fixed his striking eyes on me with a playful, yet cruel, gaze. “No exceptions.”
On his university applications he should’ve put “great at fucking up lives for no reason” under the section for special skills.
“If you’re going to start bragging about how many people or things you’ve been involved with, I’ll be gone before you finish,” I replied decisively.
He chuckled. “I’ve come to pick you up for class,” he said matter-of-factly, “like I said I would.”
“I’m not going to class,” I lied.
Aegan looked at me like I was deluded.
“Yes, you are,” he sneered, with that tone one used with someone he thought couldn’t grasp even the simplest things.
“I’m on my period,” I lied again, shrugging my shoulders. “The period to end all periods. I shed so much blood it could mark a trail as long as the Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz.”
Obviously, I didn’t want to ride with him, but me being on my period didn’t seem like a problem to him.
“We can buy tampons,” he replied nonchalantly.
“I don’t use tampons. I read that a model lost her legs from using them,” I replied. I would have used any excuse at the time, even if it was a lie. But that model thing wasn’t a lie.
Aegan shrugged his shoulders, still not seeing what the big deal was.
“Well, we can sue the tampon company if that happens,” he said, like that was the most obvious solution.
He had a wide, triumphant smile that gave me three kinds of headaches.
“Why are you so negative? Nothing’s impossible for a Cash and even less so for one of our girlfriends, so go and get dressed. I’ll wait for you here.”
He wouldn’t leave. Aegan wouldn’t take no for an answer. The more excuses I gave him, the more solutions he’d come up with. I wouldn’t put it past him to drag me out of the apartment in my pajamas just to get his way.
“You’re a pain in the ass,” I blurted out, holding back a bunch of swear words.
“I don’t mind, so long as you’re referring to Kylie Jenner’s ass,” he crooned with perverse enthusiasm.
No, more like a monkey’s hairy ass.
So, he took me to class. The car ride was weird.
We barely spoke to each other on the way there.
It wasn’t exactly an uncomfortable silence; it was like the kind of tense silence that happens between two opponents.
To lighten the mood, I decided to put on some music.
I turned on the stereo and skipped past the rap, rock, and reggaeton until I miraculously found an Adele song.
Aegan immediately changed it.
“I don’t like it,” he said.
“But it’s on your playlist,” I replied, putting it back on. He pressed the screen to play the next one.
“Adrik probably put it on there.”
Adrik listened to Adele? Fuck me! It didn’t matter; I put it on again.
“It’s good, just leave it.”
But he changed it again.
“I don’t like it. In the morning, I listen to Mick Jagger to give me a boost. The Rolling Stones are my favorite band.”
I put Adele back on. “We can listen to them after this song.”
Aegan skipped it. “No. Period.”
This was getting ridiculous, so I turned off the music and looked out the window instead.
I couldn’t help it when the thing Artie had told me about Eli popped into my head. Though if I was being honest, it hadn’t left my mind all night. I’m sorry, but it was weird. No, it was, like, really weird. No, it was so weird that it was intriguing.
And I have come to several conclusions. Tagus had as many secrets as fire extinguishers. One in every corridor. In plain sight, yet invisible. And I’m making this comparison because who even thinks about fire extinguishers? Nobody, until you need them.
Artie had needed a fire extinguisher the night before, to douse her angry flames.
But she had unknowingly sparked my curiosity.
What had happened to Eli? How could she just stop showing up at Tagus one day? Was I now taking her place?
Was I sitting where she had once sat? And more importantly, did the unfairly hot guy beside me, absentmindedly biting the inside of his lip, have anything to do with her disappearance?
I wanted to know every last detail. I needed to search for clues. Without Artie’s footage, it would’ve been virtually impossible, but the video gave me a starting point: the old library.
That was the other part of the plan that I’d kept from Artie to avoid scaring her.
If I couldn’t tell anyone that there was something fishy going on about Aegan and his ex-girlfriend’s disappearance, I’d have to look into it on my own.
I’d look for clues, anything that could help me check if Artie was right about Aegan having done something to Eli.
At the same time, Dash and Kiana—believing that all I wanted to do was humiliate Aegan—could actually help me gather more information about him. Everything was covered.
The only catch was that, because of Aegan’s golden rule, I’d only have ninety days to accomplish this.
Aegan stopped the car in front of my faculty building. I put my train of thoughts on pause and opened the door to get out without saying goodbye.
“Remember to let me know where you’ll be,” he said. I let out a laugh, not taking what he’d said seriously.
“Yeah, right.”
“Just a message, saying where you’re going,” he insisted.
I turned to him, with a teasing smile. “I’d love to see a feminist mob hear you say that.”
“I’m serious.” His unmoved face showed that he wasn’t just saying that to piss me off.
“And so am I.”
“This is one of the relationship rules you wouldn’t let me tell you,” he reminded me.
“Well, I don’t care.” I smiled.
His patience was wearing thin. He locked his intimidating gaze on me, the same one he probably used to bend others to his will. It wasn’t just Aegan’s gaze; it was the gaze of Aegan Cash, scion of the legendary and powerful Cash family.
“Listen to me, Jude,” Aegan said, uttering each word slowly and with a threatening tone. “Go ahead, make all the snarky comments you want and show off how empowered you are, but respect my rules.”
I looked at him for a minute with half-closed eyes. He held my gaze. If we’d been five years old—and maybe that’s how we looked now—we would’ve been having a stupid staring contest.
Finally, I summoned all my strength, flashed him a “sweet” smile, and nodded.
I opened the car door, stepped out, and barely had time to close it before he revved the engine and drove off.
I stood on the sidewalk, watching as he drove away.
I realized that I was holding my backpack a little too tightly against my body.
His rules?
His rules!
He’d soon see what I thought of his rules. It was time to take action.
Before I acted on that thought, I had to go to class; otherwise, I’d be kicked out of university. Education first, then I could focus on my macabre plans.
···
This story has become the perfect example of everything you shouldn’t do in life. And I intend to teach you through all my mistakes. After class, I met up with my team.
Because we all knew that no bad guy has ever been toppled without the help of a team. Harry had Ron and Hermione. I’d have Kiana, Dash and Artie, who weren’t as smart as Hermione, nor as . . . What did Ron actually do?
Anyway, they weren’t exactly the A-Team, but they’d do the trick because they had something valuable: information. They knew all about Tagus and, more importantly, all about its students.
We ended up in the campus gardens, a wide green space where students spread out blankets to study, have picnics, hold meetings or, in our case, hatch plans. There, we wouldn’t risk being overheard; with something like this, we had to be as discreet as possible, CIA-style.
Once there, the information started flowing.
“Aegan runs things,” said Kiana.
“Aleixandre is the weakest,” Dash said. “He’s like that cleaning robot in Wall-E that chases after everything while vacuuming.
He tries too hard to uphold his brothers’ reputations while also attempting to be exactly like Aegan, but he doesn’t pull it off well.
Did you notice he has no say when they’re together? ”
Yeah, I had noticed that day at the newspaper tryout. As for Adrik . . .
“He’s so hard to read,” Dash admitted thoughtfully. “He’s like a ghost. You rarely see him at parties and almost never hear any gossip about him.”
Adrik, again, was a mystery.
“Look, for this to work, you’ll have to convince Aegan and everyone else that you’re really into him,” said Kiana.
“Basically, you’ll need to throw yourself into the role of a girl in love, just like Joaquin Phoenix did in playing the Joker: masterfully.
And from what I’ve seen, whenever Aegan has a new girlfriend, she stops thinking for herself and starts thinking just like him, and they’re always together. ”